SUMMARY: Emergency! Server not allowing logins!

From: Dave Shevett (sparc!shevett@erika.bighouse.unipress.com)
Date: Tue Oct 27 1992 - 15:58:08 CST


Ahhh. Thanks to all who responded VERY promptly (oddly enough, including
Sun tech support - who called me back in approximately 45 seconds, even
though they did *not* pin down the problem. :)

My original plea:

> Our SparcServer/330 (the main file server for the office) has decided
> not to allow logins other than root any more.
>
> The symptoms: SunOS 4.1.1, no major patches.
>
> I can log in as root on the console or over the network without
> any problems. However, if I try to log in as a user (any user),
> I get:
>
> login:
> password:
> Last login:
> SunOS Release 4.1.1 ...
>
> login: Can't run /usr/ucb/quota: Permission denied
> /bin/sh: Permission denied
> No shell

As I suspected, the problem was *not* the kernel re-link I had just
completed. The two events just happened to coincide. The problem
ended up being a top level directory (/usr) had somehow changed it's
perms to 770. How I missed this the first 7 times through this
configuration, I don't know. Probably because /bin is linked to
/usr/bin, and I was getting into /usr/bin via cd /bin, or whatever.

With the perms set to 770, daemons and startup scripts run from the
rc files, and all root activitity could access files in /usr/bin,
but joe users could not.

Something so silly, that shut down the office for 3 hours until I
finally found the gosh darned file. I *still* don't know what
changed it. First suspect is an install shell script run amok.

*sigh* - Thanks again to all who responded and phoned me this morning.

---------------------.--------------------.--------------------------------
Dave Shevett | Unipress Software | "The shortest distance between
Systems Jockey | Edison, NJ USA | two puns is a straight line..."
shevett@unipress.com | (908)287-2100 x921 | - Doc Webster



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